This dissertation offers a revisionist account of American regionalist fiction. In particular, it contests prevailing diagnoses of the genre as bourgeois nostalgia by locating within its content and form a radical utopian impulse. By drawing out their engagement with socialist, feminist, anti-racist, and environmental protection movements, this project shows how regionalist texts perform both the utopian work of envisioning progressive futures and the necessarily regionalist work of orienting and charting a path toward those futures on a localized scale. Although our historical understanding of social movements during the Long Gilded Age is largely framed in the Nationalist and (proto-)Progressive politics of much overtly utopian fiction, comparative readings of William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Kate Chopin reveal within regionalist fiction a more radically democratic model for social change. This suggests, in part, that regionalist writers of the 1870s through the 1910s imagined the local rather than the national as the scale on which social change could and should be carried out.

This work will explore the interconnections between political power and the various forms of corruption endemic in Denver in the late 19th century placing municipal corruption and election fraud into the larger political, economic, social and cultural framework. Municipal political corruption in Denver operated through a series of relationships tying together, the city police, political factions, utility and industrial leaders, con men, gamblers, protection rackets and the election of U.S. Senators. This work will explore not only the operational ties, but also how these ties served all parties, and the discourse used to rationalize the behavior and distribute blame. The dates for this study are bracketed by two significant events: a mayoral election and trial in 1889-1890, and the City Hall War in the spring of 1894. Each of these events represents a point when a rupture in the tight net of political control sparked a battle for hegemony with a concomitant turn to corruption and election fraud on the part of competing political factions. The level of municipal corruption in Denver was not necessarily unusual; however, the extent of the documentation enables a detailed analysis. Denver newspapers blamed the corruption on an unspecified "gang" and a shadowy "machine." The editors railed against the scourge of con men, and simultaneously used the ubiquitous fraud as a metaphor for trickery and corruption of all kinds. This detailed analysis reveals a more complex series of events through which a cabal of business and industry leaders seized control of both the city and the state government, giving them the political power to wage what has been called a war against labor.

An environmental and cultural history of cities between 1870 and 1930s, "Winters in America" explores the changing material and cultural relationship that Americans formed with winter in the urban spaces of the country. During this period of immense demographic, social, and technological change most Americans encountered winter nature in the industrial city, and subsequently formed their environmental experiences and knowledge of the season through city life. Using case studies of five cities - Boston, Chicago, St. Paul, Tucson and Phoenix - this study shows how winter labor, leisure, and culture in the Gilded Age city not only informed built environments but was also marshaled by Americans to interpret the appearance of the season, resulting in an emerging urban environmental and seasonal culture. Indeed, the growth of cities in combination with social and technological changes played a significant role in reorienting how many residents experienced and understood winter in their lives. Access to and control over winter narratives were not inclusive, however, and the evolving culture of winter typically favored particular classes of citizens. Winter celebrations, employment aid, work, and winter health resorts, for example, shifted the experiences and social values injected into the season. Ultimately, an examination of winter in the city during this period demonstrates the continued environmental power of season in the lives of urban Americans, while exposing the cultural power many Americans ascribed to the coldest season.

Thesis advisor: Heather Cox Richardson / Throughout the nineteenth century, southern Democrats had one continual objective: to preserve racial hierarchy in their home region. Direct efforts in the 1870s, though, failed to eliminate the threat that Republicans might renew Reconstruction. So, in the 1880s, white southerners in Congress developed an array of softer, less direct approaches. Their goal was to foster reconciliation with white northerners, undercutting support for Reconstruction and securing white supremacy for the South. With one issue more than any other, they succeeded: expansion of the U.S. Navy. Recognizing that global developments and the decrepit state of the U.S. Navy were increasing concern about national defense, Congressman Hilary Abner Herbert (D-AL) positioned himself to become a champion of naval expansion. A former enslaver with no maritime experience, the Confederate colonel leveraged an appointment as chair of the House Committee on Naval Affairs in 1885. Over the next eight years, Herbert established bipartisan and cross-sectional support for naval legislation in the House and spearheaded the most drastic peacetime military buildup Americans had ever seen. The interests of this “Father of the New Navy,” though, were chiefly sectional. For Herbert, militarization was a means to advancing reconciliation and securing white supremacy for the South. He stated this purpose clearly both in private and public. In 1890, he put it into practice. When Republicans introduced legislation to address voting rights in the South, Herbert wielded his reputation for bipartisanship and reconciliation against it, threatening violence and an end to economic unity. On the national level, Herbert’s use of naval expansion to further reconciliation escalated militarization and paved the way for an overseas U.S. empire. In the South, the Alabamian’s efforts helped open the door for a new system of legalized white supremacy that he celebrated as “a final solution of the negro question.” / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Scholars in the history and sociology of engineering in the United States have commented critically on the unwillingness of twentieth century engineers to participate actively in politics. Alfred Chandler, for example, has noted the absence of engineers in Progressive Era reform movements, while Edwin T. Layton Jr has criticized engineers in the 1920s for an excessive focus on sterile status seeking. This perceived lack of twentieth century engineering activism is especially puzzling given that nineteenth-century American engineers and engineering societies did not hesitate to lobby openly for clean water, smoke abatement, municipal reform, and numerous other issues. / Ph. D.

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In 1870, physicians in United States were not licensed by the state or federal governments, but by 1900 almost every state and territory passed some form of medical licensing. Regular physicians originally promoted licensing laws as way to marginalize competing Homeopathic and Eclectic physicians, but eventually, elite Regular physicians worked with organized, educated Homeopathic and Eclectic physicians to lobby for medical licensing laws. Physicians knew that medical licensing was not particularly appealing to state legislatures. Therefore, physicians successfully packaged licensing laws with broader public health reforms to convince state legislatures that they were necessary. By tying medical licensing laws with public health measures, physicians also provided a strong legal basis for courts to find these laws constitutional. While courts were somewhat skeptical of licensing, judges ultimately found that licensing laws were a constitutional use of state police powers. The quasi-governmental organizations created by licensing laws used their legal authority to expand the scope of the practice of medicine and slowly sought to force all medical specialists to obtain medical licenses. By expanding the scope of the practice of medicine, physicians successfully seized control of most aspects of healthcare. These organizations also sought to eliminate any unlicensed medical competition by requiring all medical specialists to attend medical schools approved by state licensing boards. Ultimately, licensing laws and a growing understanding of medical science gradually merged the three largest competing medical sects and unified the practice of medicine under physicians. This dissertation includes previously published material. / 2016-06-17

In 1881 an assassin's bullet changes the course of American history. Could it be that Julia Sand was the only one to foresee the destiny of the country? Familiar with now President Arthur's exclusionary politics, Julia writes and urges the President to reform his ways and unite the Republican Party. Great Emergencies is a stage play about the lavish dangers of The Gilded Age, but ultimately a cautionary tale about those of us whose voices are doomed to be forgotten because of the ephemeral and apathetic nature of human history.

This dissertation examines Mark Twain’s literary-critical reputation from the years 1865 to 1882, as he transformed from the regional “wild humorist of the Pacific Slope” to a national and international celebrity who William Dean Howells called “the most popular humorist who ever lived.” This dissertation considers “Mark Twain” not as the name of a literary author, but as a fictional creation who was narrator and implied author of both fictional and non-fiction texts, a performer who played his role on lecture platforms and other public venues, and a celebrity whose fame spread from the American west through America and the world. The key question of this dissertation is the historical position of the “humorist,” a hierarchical cultural category that included high culture literary figures, such as James Russell Lowell and Bret Harte; literary comedians, such as Artemus Ward and Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby; and clowns and minstrels, who were placed at the bottom of the hierarchy. I argue that Mark Twain muddied the hierarchical distinctions between class-appropriate leisure and burgeoning forms of mass entertainment, between uplifting humor and debased laughter, and between the canonical literature of high culture and the passing whim of the merely popular. Through the success of The Innocents Abroad (1869) and the promotion of William Dean Howells, Mark Twain was elevated into critical discussions of literary value, and in the 1870s he entered into venues of higher prestige: so-called “quality” magazines such as the Galaxy and the Atlantic Monthly, lecture stages on the lyceum circuit and in England, and the personal realm of friendship with other authors. While Twain was accepted into some literary cultures, other critics attempted to consign him to literary oblivion, or simply ignored him, while Twain himself betrayed keen anxiety about his role as “stripèd humorist” in respectable literary realms. This dissertation thus focuses on written works, critical interpretations, and performative instances in which “Mark Twain,” as both agent and subject, brought debates over “American Humor,” “American Literature,” and “American Culture” to the fore. / text

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